Frank commentary from an unretired call girl

See No Evil

‘Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil. – William Shakespeare, Macbeth (II, ii)

Very young children are unable to distinguish image from reality; they perceive frightening pictures or hostile words as equivalent to concrete threats. Rational adults understand that this is not so; things without physical power to harm, however shocking or unpleasant they may be, can be dismissed by the disciplined mind and therefore cannot be compared to tangible phenomena. That’s why many people enjoy horror movies; they enable us to confront terrifying images or ideas in a safe environment. No matter how awful the fictional spook, it has no actual power to harm us, so we’re free to experience fear without long-term repercussions. The same could be said of tragedies, adventure stories and even porn; the feelings they evoke are mere specters, with no ability to reach into the physical world unless we give it to them. Like vampires, the emotions produced by words and images can only cause harm by invitation; as Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” and no one can make you feel anything else without your consent, either.

But somehow, people in Western countries have lost sight of this simple principle. I suspect it’s due to the fact that so many of them live in a state of complete isolation from Nature; because they are rarely (if ever) in any real danger, words and pictures (which they encounter frequently) seem to be more of a threat than actual physical menaces. How many people in Western countries are really worried about, say, bubonic plague or lightning strike? These dangers are far too remote to cause alarm, because everyone knows they’re rare. The “threats” about which middle-class Westerners express the greatest concern are either those they hear of frequently or those which the media can convince them are omnipresent, which is why groups who derive income and power from some particular fear (rape, “illegal aliens”, terrorism, “human trafficking”, child sexual abuse, etc) cook up bogus statistics to make those threats seem vastly more common than they actually are.

This obsession with the insubstantial and/or inconsequential has created a bizarre inversion of priorities in many Western countries; major issues which are largely hidden from public view, or which affect a comparatively small number of people, are virtually ignored in favor of absurdly expensive, intrusive and punitive campaigns against “crimes” which actually injure nobody. One example of this is the crusade against “child porn”; mere possession of an image is deemed a “crime” equal to using actual children to create that image, and artificial images such as sketches or written descriptions are in many cases considered equivalent to the real thing; this is tantamount to banning fictional depictions of murder. The excuse used is that artificial images “create a demand” for porn, but this is mere sophistry; human beings are not computers to be programmed, and as any marketing expert will tell you it’s impossible to “create” a demand for something without somehow tying it to a real demand such as the desire for food, sex, status, health, wealth, etc. In other words, one can’t “market” child porn to anyone who isn’t already sexually attracted to children, and to argue that draconian anti-porn legislation is justified on “end demand” grounds is equivalent to arguing that everyone should be sterilized at puberty because the male sex drive leads to rape and pregnancy to abortion and child abuse. Demand for movies and music leads to copyright violation, but I don’t see anyone campaigning to ban music and movies because of it.

This obsession with the image over the fact leads to abominations like a recent case reported in Reason on November 7th:

Last week a Florida judge sentenced Daniel Enrique Guevara Vilca, a 26-year-old with no criminal record, to life in prison without the possibility of parole for looking at forbidden pictures. A jury convicted Vilca on 454 counts of possessing child pornography, one for each image found on his computer. Under Florida law, each count is a…felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Sentencing guidelines indicated a minimum term of 152 years…”Had Mr. Vilca actually molested a child,” The New York Times notes, “he might well have received a lighter sentence.”

…the draconian punishments prescribed by state and federal laws for mere possession of child pornography seem to be based on the premise that anyone who looks at records of heinous acts must also be committing them or at least planning to do so. But as I [previously] noted…that simply isn’t so: Research indicates that child porn consumers, like fans of violent movies, do not necessarily copy what they see. As Troy Stabenaw, a federal public defender who wrote a devastating 2009 critique of federal sentencing guidelines for child pornography, tells the Times, “we ought to punish people for what they do, not for our fear.”

…the familiar argument that “consumers of child pornography drive the market for the production of child pornography…” [is hardly] relevant…now that people typically obtain child porn online for free…[and the prosecutor’s claim that] “…when the images are shown over and over again, they’re victimized over and over again”…seems even more problematic, since any such injury would require (at the very least) that victims know when people are looking at images of them…[and] would not apply to child pornography featuring victims who are no longer alive…[Furthermore] the offense is not in the same moral ballpark as other crimes that are punished by life sentences…a life sentence is what we give first-degree murderers, and possession of child pornography is not the equivalent of first-degree murder…

The fact of the matter is that possession of child porn is vastly more common than child rape, therefore cops, prosecutors and judges see it more often, therefore they conclude it’s a more important issue and push for harsher laws on it. In other words, the punishment is based on the personal emotional discomfort of those in power rather than physical harm to any person.

The current hysteria over “bullying” is another example; what person has never been bullied or observed another being bullied? Such behavior is merely the human equivalent of animals posturing and snarling to establish a pecking order; it cannot be eliminated without lobotomizing the entire population at about the age of four. If the anti-bullying people were concentrating on instances of actual, physical assault I would find their arguments much more convincing, but they’re largely talking about words. I was bullied in grade school; I was unusually bright, read a lot, was a bit plump, hit puberty at 10, had a severe overbite, used “big words”, liked science fiction…you name it, I got picked on for it. And you know when it stopped? When I grew a spine and a thicker skin and stopped letting words get to me. Bullies crave an upset or submissive reaction; when they don’t get it they move on in search of easier prey.

But now the sheeple want the nanny state to “correct” human nature, and not just among children; now we’ve got biologically-adult women whining and crying because men say mean and “sexist” things to them online. And it isn’t just sheltered coeds and mommy-bloggers, either; this November 7th article from The Guardian features pathetic laments from professional women who have somehow managed to succeed in journalism while failing to develop the psychological barriers I had established by the age of 14. They argue that death-threats or “I hope you get raped” type nonsense is different from “you’re ugly” or “you’re stupid” or whatever, and in a way I agree; it’s certainly symptomatic of a less-evolved individual. But as long as he sticks to writing empty threats to strangers, he’s nothing but a barking dog; people have been making such threats since language was invented, and every statistic shows they are now much less likely to carry them out. Still, these women argue that Nanny should censor or even punish men who hurt their feelings online, though at least one of them (Zoe Williams) seems to think that bullying is OK as long as a soi-disant “feminist” directs it against another woman. Not that this surprises me; “feminists” are famous for dishing out hatred but being unable to take it.

As I pointed out in my column of one year ago today, people used to understand that it’s better to tolerate minor “evils” which prevent greater ones than to indulge oneself in a doomed and quixotic crusade to rid the world of all unpleasantness. If artificial child porn reduces the chance of child rape, and if posting ugly threats on the internet prevents real violence, these things need to be tolerated; I for one would much rather endure empty rape-threats than to know a real woman was raped. Words and pictures are not real, and adults need not concern themselves with painted devils.

And we’ll hire more lawmakers – who on day ONE of their tenure will pass “LAW NUMBER ONE” of the new order. On day two – it’ll be “Law Number Two” and it will proceed like that until the new order is choked with rules and regulations – and it will all be destroyed again and the cycle will repeat.

If we were smart – we’d place a moratorium on laws. However, no government is deemed a success unless it’s passing new laws everyday. It’s goofy – totally goofy.

I think, every 100 years – a “Congress” of the people should be held, whereby 75% of the laws on the books have to be selected for nullification and repeal. You’d have the choice of keeping the best 25% of the laws on the books – the rest go into the sh** can because most of them are “busy body” laws anyway.

But we don’t have this kind of discipline so yeah – it will all go up in smoke spectacularly and then we’ll all scratch our collective heads and wonder why it did. LOL

Grace had a brilliant idea the other day; we need a constitutional amendment which says that no legislature can make a new law unless it repeals three old ones at the same time. If legislators can’t come up with three, the new law is automatically invalid.

Before I retired from the Navy – I worked with several Admirals. All but one of them came into the job and started making radical changes. That was the way they made their mark. Now, I know organizations have inefficiencies that need to be repaired – but they didn’t address those things. They came in, shook up the whole mess – redesigned it from the ground up – and then would send me out on the road to make speeches to sell it to the troops. Of course – these guys only stayed in those positions for 6 months – I was there for three years. It got to the point that when I went out in the fleet – guys would tell me … “Hey wait – weren’t you just here last year saying something completely different?”

Uhm … yeah … had a different boss then.

Then I got this aviator Admiral – and he didn’t shake anything up. I asked why and he said … “It’s the flaw of human institutions that we always must fix that which isn’t broken.”

He was a wise and refreshing man. He also was a former TopGun instructor – LOL, one day I was pondering a problem too much and he told me … “You know, when the bad guy is on your nose – you’re winning … if he’s anywhere else – you are LOOSING.” Keep the problem on the nose – he said that was about 80% of the TopGun curriculum was just teaching pilots that.

Of course – I think he got two stars and then retired – he never made it to the top – those ranks are reserved for the guys “fixing” what’s not “broken”.

Totally agree with you on the bully thing Maggie. I was a skinny lanky kid who got bullied until I hit puberty … that’s when I suddenly got some “width” to add to the height. VENGEANCE!! LOL. Childhood is when you learn your weaknesses – and you gain the skills to overcome them for when you’re in the adult world. Shielding one from those weaknesses only means the adult will be unable to cope.

Just did my 30 year High School reunion last year … and it’s amazing to see how the people have changed. Most all of them have overcome their weaknesses. The shy ones – no so shy anymore. The weak ones? I saw some pretty big boys there who were skinny little mites in High School.

Then again I saw some Cheerleaders I would have given my left arm for 10 minutes on a cot with back in High School … I’m now glad I didn’t! LOL

On the child porn thing – I’ll just have to take your word for it. Child porn bothers me. The fact that this guy got more time in jail for looking at it than if he’d molested a kid – really doesn’t bother me that much since i think anyone who abuses a child like that ought to be locked up for life anyway – or have the lever pulled on his ass.

Maybe I’m wrong on this – but it just appears that, as a society, we’re moving more and more toward child exploitation. More and more women try to look like “girls” … dress like girls … act like girls … shave ALL their hair to LOOK like little girls. It’s disturbing to me.

Seeing two guys having sex creeps me out, but that doesn’t mean we should ban it. The only concern a government should have when discussing whether to outlaw any given action is, “Does it allow one person to harm another without his permission?” If yes, then there’s a case for a law against it; if no, then any law against it is automatically unjust and morally invalid.

Still – for guys like Jerry Sandusky at Penn State – I think he ought to burn – just my opinion and if they need someone to do it for the state I’ll volunteer for that duty and eat a ham sandwich as I pull that lever.

Maybe it’s my testosterone that makes me angry at these situations. I don’t remember who said it – but I seem to remember a quote from some woman to the effect … “People say I don’t have the balls for this job and – maybe I don’t. Then again, I’m glad I don’t have to think with them 100% of the time either!”

Also, this kind of thing brings up all kinds of related issues…it doesn’t make sense to me that those that actually abduct children and harm them get punishments that are less harsh than those who look at things that they shouldn’t, even though that is repugnant as well.
It also clearly points out the rights of the individual vs. the rights of corporations…because corporations are clearly free to exploit child & teen sexuality across all media, as well as was mentioned, with fashion. But any lone man caught looking at a picture of a 17 year old has to lose his life. *sigh*

“More and more women try to look like “girls” … dress like girls … act like girls … shave ALL their hair to LOOK like little girls. It’s disturbing to me.

And of course – they do it because it seems men are demanding it.”

Really? Where? Which men? I’m being serious, is this like a trend now?

The trend that I’ve noticed is an attempt at making younger & younger children appear sexy, even going so far as bikinis for young ones, but I’m not aware of adult women making an attempt to shave their business or dress like children, or anything of that nature.

I have to agree with that statement, both of young girls acting sexy, and adults acting like young girls has been on the increase over the last decade. Of course the precedent of equating “young = beautiful” in women is ancient, but there is a newer aspect to it that is on the rise.

Not all men demand it, but there are many who insist young = beautiful, and there are way too many porn sites specializing in 18 year-olds for comfort.

The weak ones? I saw some pretty big boys there who were skinny little mites in High School.

I listened to an interview with Tom Wilson on a national radio talk show. He’s best known for playing Biff Tannen from the “Back to the Future” movie franchise.

Apparently he was a chess club sci-fi skinny geek until the summer after his junior year in high school when he added weight and height to his frame. He said his senior year was “interesting” because he never picked a fight but finished numerous ones that had been picked by bullies picking on his geeky friends.

He figured that that was why his character Biff Tannen was so spot on. Because he’d spent most of his life being victimized by such cretins.

In my own case, I was the skinny geek – 5’7″, 120 lbs. The summer before my senior year, I got a job running a 30 lb chainsaw at 9000 feet. I didn’t add any height but put 35 lbs on in two weeks of work. By the end of the summer I weighed 175 and had the shrink-wrapped look that most body builders aspire to. I preferred conflict management, though, to punching someone’s lights out.

A friend of mine moved in from California and had two of the local no-necks that were going to show the new guy who was who. Although he was a golden gloves boxer, all he did was kick one of the guys in the crotch as they converged on him. With one guy in the fetal position on the ground, the other protested, “That’s not fair!”

“Oh, and two to one odds is?” He didn’t have any problems after that.

I think that the zero tolerance policies are really a bad idea. At best, they treat aggressor and defender as if they were morally equal. But what usually happens is the aggressor gets a pass and the guy defending himself gets it in the neck from the school administration.

The same friend I referred to before had a similar situation occur with his son and nephew (who he had taken into his home because of parental issues). A gang of 13 kids were terrorizing other students – threatening them, beating them up, stealing lunch money, etc. There had been numerous complaints by parents but the administration had done nothing to stop it.

They targeted his two kids. Unfortunately for the gangsters, they’d had Tae Kwon Do training and these two kicked their asses. They actually only had to engage 5 or 6 of them because once it became obvious that the leaders were getting their butts beat, the rest ran off.

Now, the school administration took action. By suspending the two victims. My friend had to go to the school board with an attorney and threaten a lawsuit to get that reversed. He was going to sue on the basis of failing to provide a safe environment and he got his hands on the complaints made previously by parents that illustrated a pattern of neglect on the part of the administration. The school board reversed the administration.

Oh, and the reason the gangsters hadn’t been disciplined? Because the leaders’ parents were politically prominent in the local scene. Apparently they agreed to rein in their little monsters once it became a political liability. The school administration didn’t take any action against them.

Right on, Maggie. The Feds say that any images of child porn that they find buried in your computer (deleting them does not destroy them) is a felony. If you went to a website where there was an advertisement for cartoon kiddy porn, that’s a felony too, even if you didn’t download it. How Fascist can it get?

Thankyou for saying that. If one looks at enough adult porn, it is virtually certain that one will view child porn even though one would hate to view child porn. Remember Traci Lords of the 1980’s. She was 15 with a gorgeous voluptuous adult woman’s body and a credible fake identification credentials and Penthouse Magazine among others were proverbially crucified unjustly even though they followed the letter to the law and she didn’t. Nothing happened to her. If one has a Penthouse magazine with Traci Lords at age 15 in it or any other child porn and one doesn’t know that she isn’t 18 or older, and beleieves her to be 18 or older, and she under 18 years old, it doesn’t matter. The law will prosecute you as if you could and should have known better. There is no defense like there might be with other alleged crimes such as murder. It’s called strict liability. Tucker Max in his book “Assholes Finish First” discusses how he almost got caught up having sex with teenage female minor. The laws on statutory rape and child porn are in some respects remarkably similar. Although I truly hate child porn and statutory rape too,, I don’t believe in the strict liability laws. The law should be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt intent and deliberation or unwarranted neglect like they do for every other crime.including murder or assault and battery etc.

These laws are meant to lessen our liberty and have a disparate impact on destroying or controling men who are rightly percieved as the biggest threat against the government or state or our ruling elite in my humble opinion. Notice how comparitively little is done to adult women who have sex with minor teenage males. The government even makes these teenage minor males pay child support to the adult females whom they impregnated.

Sentenced to four years in jail on 16 counts of sexual battery … on ….

16 year old football players.

I believe they were all above the age of consent but Ohio has a special law outlawing teacher / student sex.

I really don’t consider these guys “victims”. In fact, the same thing happened to me when I was in High School – only the woman was 34-35 and not a teacher but someone I tended a pool for. It was totally her idea but I enthusiastically jumped on the chance. If you are a boy and have never had sex before (which was my case) – it’s an ideal situation to have an older woman tell you … “Just relax and we will do this until you feel comfortable – it’s not a big deal”. It makes a world of difference because, when you are 17 sex is ALL you think about as a guy and it hurts you think about it so much – so of course, you think it is a big thing.

Anyway – I guess I’m in favor of a bit of a double standard here – I can see maybe some older men prey on younger women … but I don’t see boys as victims to older women … maybe because I was one of those “victims” … and wonderfully so.

Most teenage male minors would jump on the chance to have sex with adult women. So would many teenage female minors jump on the chance to have sex with adult men. However, in the interest of fairness, this woman teacher having sex with male teenageers at best got the same punishment a male teacher would get for doing the same to teenage females. At worst, she was let off easy. She had sex with 5 male teenagers. The problem is whichever male teenager got a female adult pregnant would have to pay for child support in spite of him being a minor and she a legal adult which is unjustified because he can not sign a contract, vote, serve in the military, is not considered a full adult etc. If a male teacher got a female teenager pregnant, he would have to pay child support which is justified since he was a legal adult. At minimum, this teacher got what she deserved because of the threat of child support. If these teenage males weren’t required to pay child support in the event of a pregnancy, I could understand the desire to be more lenient, and just fire her even though I would consider such an opinion wrong. My attitude is what’s good for the goose is good for the gander and vice versa.

I’m a big believer in genuine equality of the sexes under the law even though in reality we will never be equal because we are different sexes. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and I believe in equality of opportunity, not result. As I’ve said before, if you want chivalry, then be my true legal and social inferior. If you want equality, don’t expect it to always be pleasant and definitely don’t expect chivalry. I’d choose equality over chivarly, but you can choose differently. It’s your choice ladies: equality or chivalry—-you don’t get both from me, and you don’t deserve both from anyone.

The basis for the objection here is around issues of consent. When an authority figure tells a impressionable kid what to do consent gets muddled. Of course it’s worse when the teacher plainly coerces the kid but even without that the dynamic is obviously different from two people of the same age and standing doing it. I’ll give that it was consensual if you remember consenting, but in general it ought to be discouraged at a minimum.

I am disgusted by teachers who have sex with their students, and I say that as a teacher, though not one in the traditional public-school, in-a-classroom sense of the word.

I agree completely that the boys in this case were not “victims;” I remember in one seventh-grade French teacher in particular whose “victim” I would have loved to have been. However, as a teacher, it is your job not just to educate, but to provide a positive adult example, to help your students when they need it – in short, to provide some of the functions of a parent.

To be sure, there are plenty of teachers who fall short of this mark, but that does not change the assumed underlying relationship.

It is wrong to complicate that relationship with sex. As just a single example of a reason, sex with a teacher is a form of sleeping with the judge: the teacher is responsible for grading her students at the end of the year (or semester, or whatever) – can we expect her to be fair when she is having sex with some? I could not fairly compare two adult women, one of whom I was sleeping with, even if I consciously attempted to correct any bias.

Well, death threats are a bit different from that other stuff. They’re an attempt to intimidate someone with the threat of hurting them against their will, which is a type of assault. Granted, anonymous death threats on the internet are nothing to worry about, but it still seems like a pretty clear crime.

From what I’ve heard death threats with your address occur also. It is possible for a skilled hacker to find your address, phone number, etc. much of the time. This is more rare than “u deserv 2 B kild” but it does happen. It still doesn’t necessarily mean they will go after you, but how are you supposed to know that?

Even if these bloggers do develop a thicker skin one has to wonder why a woman writing about say…gluten free cooking inspires such murderous rage. (Because she’s overweight yet still dares to eat and have children apparently)

It’s not the cooking bloggers who get it, but the political ones. And though there hasn’t been a survey I’d bet you a sizable chunk of cash that strident anti-male feminists get it more than anyone else. For the record, I’ve gotten exactly one such “death threat” since I started this blog.

Bullying. Well, in primary I was a skinny kid, a ginger with glasses. I also had an evil mind, and you picked on me at your peril. One boy did, picked on my friends and I incessantly. I convinced him I would set him on fire and burn him alive if he persisted, and that sorted him out.

The whole child thing. I still have very mixed feelings on. I had a fake ID and was serving alcohol before I was 18. Was that my employers fault? I think not.Would there have been all that much difference had I had sex with a 35 year old the day before I turned 18 as opposed to the day after?

But let’s face it- We’re all very dysfunctional about sex in the USA. We’re terribly frightened of it. We’ve all been through the trafficking thing before, at the turn of the century when they called it white slavery, and warned young women coming to the big city to avoid candy store run by foreigners, who used the stores as a front to lure them into sexual servitude. Eventually, that fear was found to be bogus.

The only way out of any of this mess is a healthier attitude towards sex. Instead, we repress it and are therefor obsessed with it. The sexual hypocrisy in this nation is astounding.

We’ve all been through the trafficking thing before, at the turn of the century when they called it white slavery, and warned young women coming to the big city to avoid candy store run by foreigners, who used the stores as a front to lure them into sexual servitude.

The fear with child pornography may be based on the idea that proclivities form in a way similar to habits and skills and muscles and neurons. That is practicing them reinforces them in the long run. The pop-psychology belief that the human mind works like a boiler, in frequent need of release unless pressure builds and causes an explosion, is common but I’ve never heard of any sort of proof. Of course the idea that practicing a proclivity doesn’t have a lot of hard scientific proof either, but there is some, and it seems to be the general modus operandi of the mind and body.

In my personal experience establishing pecking orders is only part of bullying. A more important part is the juvenile need to attack unusual people, those who operate outside of whatever unwritten rules of the playground exist. I definitely went past those rules. To a few I was incomprehensible, but mostly I was comprehended as a target.

Of course, homosexuals receive more bullying than the average heterosexual, and they receive even more bullying in communities where the adults feel the same way. The adults won’t bully a kid usually, but they will confirm and validate the hostile feelings of those bullies.

Also in my experience, teachers don’t necessarily react to bullying, even when it creates a scene. I’m fairly certain that if the teachers intervened it would influence how the students think about bullying. Even if the bullies still hate on you, maybe they would keep it to themselves. I don’t know if there are any proper scientific studies, but there is anecdotal evidence.

There was a famous scene in Tales of Old Dartmoor – a Goon Show script from the fifties – in which the characters ‘capture’ Dartmoor Prison and ride it away, but cunningly leave ‘a cardboard replica in its place.’ The brilliant Milligan-Sellers team did other things, like hold each other up with photographs of guns etc. There seems to be a tendency for both state legislatures in the US and our UK Parliament to try to re-enact this in real life.

I can accept that many people find many images distasteful, and photographs of appalling things exist, but I have to say that I have never found a single image more chilling than the swastika, copies of which are, of course, freely available to all ages, and I don’t see exposure to such material rendering its beholders fashists.

It is illegal here (UK) to possess any image of injury being done to the anus or to primary or secondary sex organs. Even possession of a still from the ball crushing scene in, was it Casino Royale?, could result in imprisonment as such images, if extracted from the movie, count! Possession of ‘child porn’ is also an offence, but what constitutes ‘child porn’ is unclear, some regard any photo of a child in a ‘state of undress’ as such, or a child in the presence of someone of the opposite sex in a state of undress. Anyway, possession of whatever it is that constitutes child porn can result in a lengthy prison sentence and inclusion on the Sex Offenders Register (which is becoming increasingly useless as more and more persons are included for trivial offences).

Personally, I am opposed to the involvement of children in what I would call pornography, and I fully accept a need to address the demand for such pornography in principle – I see no other practical way to address it, given the web – but it is the purchase that feeds the producers, not mere possession. Establishing purchase, however, would require our police and prosecutors to actually do some work, which is probably a crime in itself, and would mean actually targetting the problem and being cost-effective, which is a definite no-no for our Home Office.

Occasionally here, some rapist or other serious offender is revealed to possess hardcore porn, and the media all jump to the conclusion there’s a link. With astonishing effrontery, our Home Office feely admits no such link has been established, but plods on in its censorious way regardless.

Maybe we could take charge? Maggie, why not enter your Congress and yell at ’em, and if you have any trouble, just pull out a photo of a nuke?

As somebody who has never bullied anyone in her entire life (and never had any desire to), I have to take exception to the notion that bullying is normal human pecking order behavior. It is abnormal behavior, and it’s nothing that couldn’t be cured with a good cane-whipping.

Yeah, I said cane-whipping. Child-abuse only applies to normal children, not children who choose to bully. And if the bullies choose to “get revenge” on their victims for their punishment, they will be cane-whipped again. And again, until they stop.

Just think: if George Bush Junior had been cane-whipped when he needed it, he would be a productive citizen today instead of the cocaine-sniffing war criminal he turned out to be.

Going off on somewhat of a tangent – Maggie, do you happen to know of any figures as to what proportion of men who use child porn actually abuse children as well? (I should clarify that this is a question I wanted the answer to for completely different reasons, not the prelude to a “B… b…. but these men are going on to *rape children*” rant.)

Obviously, it’s tough to know that because many men who look at child porn but never do anything else probably never get caught. But there have been studies of those who are convicted for child porn; here’s a passage from the Reason magazine article linked in the second paragraph of the long indented quote of my essay above (emphasis mine):

Although conventional wisdom assumes child-porn consumers are undiscovered or future molesters, that assumption is…wrong. This year Michael Seto, a psychologist who advises the Integrated Forensic Program of the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group, published a study of this question, co-authored by Karl Hanson and Kelly M. Babchishin of Public Safety Canada, in the journal Sexual Abuse. Seto, Hanson, and Babchishin performed meta-analyses of 24 studies that looked at the criminal histories of “online offenders” (mainly consumers of child pornography) and eight studies that calculated their recidivism rates. They found that one in eight had an official record of committing a contact offense. In the six studies that included self-report data (drawn from treatment sessions and polygraph examinations), one in two child pornography offenders admitted to having sexual contact with children.

Looking forward, Seto says, “C.P. offenders are relatively unlikely to commit contact offenses in the studies that have followed them.” Over all, the recidivism studies indicate that only 2 percent of child pornography offenders committed a sexual offense involving physical contact during the follow-up period, which ranged from 18 months to six years. In short, says Hanson, “there does exist a distinct group of offenders who are Internet-only and do not present a significant risk for hands-on sex offending.”

Why would anyone look at this horrible stuff if he was not inclined to imitate it? Troy Stabenow, an assistant federal public defender in Missouri who is a prominent critic of child pornography sentencing policies, put it this way in a 2009 interview with ABA Journal: “People who watch movies like Saw and Friday the 13th are being titillated by the act of torture and murder. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to go out and commit torture and murder.”

Dean Boland, an Ohio defense attorney specializing in child pornography cases, says a substantial share of defendants were themselves victims of sexual abuse as children and look at these images as a way of working through the trauma. He recalls one client, a 65-year-old former pastor who received a sentence of more than 17 years, saying, “When I’m looking at these images, I’m not envisioning myself as the adult. I’m envisioning myself as the kid.”

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Boring but necessary legal stuff

All original content on this website (i.e. all of my columns, pages and anything else which I write myself) is protected under international copyright law as of the time it is posted; though you may link to it as you please or quote passages (as long as you attribute the quote to me), please do not reproduce whole columns without my express written permission. In other words, you have to say "pretty please with sugar on top" first, and then wait for me to say "okey-dokey".